Gruber seems to be right about things a lot of the time, though that's easy when the people he disagrees with are prone to willfully ignoring the fact that Apple is making hundreds of millions of dollars doing what it's doing and is preposterously unlikely to make any sudden changes in strategy. Also less of a raging, belligerent asshole than you might expect.

Also wrt the "buy whole cell phone industry" post that is sort of following up on an earlier link about how Apple could easily have enough cash in a few years to take itself private. That is, in an industry where firms are frequently assessed by their market cap or their VC funding or what have you, Apple actually has HUMONGOUS FAT STACKS OF CASH.

agreed that this guy is a bit of a dick, he has unsavory triumphalist tendencies, and thinks various middlebrow stuff is the height of human achievement - however as to his core competency, i do believe hes one of the best writers on design out there today

I don't think Cringely's being nuts there! Even if Jobs is showing pictures of full server rooms, it's not like he's shown pictures of the entire interior of the facility, and it's completely possible that it's not that densely populated.

actually i think i hate sub-gruber wannabe sycophant ux doods even worse than gruber proper - so much hot air about making software "empathetic," so much whining about not getting paid to be a thought leader, so much referring to "marco" by the mononym...

It's like his amazing high trafficked and revolutionary new sports website, which is actually a fucking tumble blog about baseball where you click on the notes to find less than half a dozen people 'liked' each post and fuck-all anybody reblogged anything, because why the fuck would you.

First, the headline. I think it’s clear that Apple Pay is siding with the credit companies and banks — but they’re not pitted against consumers, they’re pitted against retailers. It’s retailers who want to reduce the use of credit cards (and the resulting fees). Not consumers. Any consumer who doesn’t want to use a credit card can simply not use a credit card. (They can still use Apple Pay with debit cards.) Apple Pay is only allowing us to more easily and securely use the credit/debit cards we already have. For consumers, nothing is worse post-Apple Pay (transaction fees are not higher — the banks pay Apple’s 0.15 percent cut), and much is better (security, privacy, and convenience).

I understand the argument that the 2-3 percent processing fees that retailers pay for credit cards are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, but for consumers that can be offset by cash back and reward programs from their card providers.

I don’t understand how this article amounts to anything more than “Apple should have used magic” hand-waving. What could Apple have done differently that would have actually worked, without involving credit card processors? Remember, Apple Pay doesn’t require retailers to install Apple Pay-specific POS terminal hardware. It famously works with the standard NFC hardware that’s been out for years. Building atop the existing credit card infrastructure is fundamental to people’s willingness to try Apple Pay and to retailers’ ability to accept it. Pressman is implicitly arguing that Apple should have somehow reinvented the entire retail electronic payments industry, without the help of the banks or credit card companies, and presumably with the cooperation of retailers. But we see with CurrentC/MCX the sort of things the retailers would have demanded of Apple in such a hypothetical systems.

Uploading what has always been local-only (hell, what had always been in-memory-only) to US servers without notice is pretty bad news. Depending on what you happened to be typing (eg personal data) you could be breaking all sorts of laws, from data protection to HIPAA.

Handoff of a given user activity requires the originating app to designate that activity’s NSUserActivity object as the current activity, save pertinent data for continuation on another device, and send the data to the resuming device. Handoff passes only enough information between the devices to describe the activity itself, while larger-scale data synchronization is handled through iCloud.

is that what this is angling at? idk i'm not a dev so i might be misconstruing

i do think it's pretty sketchy that data is being transmitted possibly across legal jurisdictions w/o explicit action of saving it on the part of the user if it's not made explicitly clear that's what's happening

Uploading what has always been local-only (hell, what had always been in-memory-only) to US servers without notice is pretty bad news. Depending on what you happened to be typing (eg personal data) you could be breaking all sorts of laws, from data protection to HIPAA.

I was quite surprised to hear about it, yep.

The compliance issues are infuriating. Especially since it sounds like sloppy engineering rather than a useful feature.

I think it's a useful feature but it's one of those things where engineering does it without running it through the right channels

we have those in my workplace, we call them "cowboys" and they finally got shut down after being told that not trusting systems administrators is not a reason to run a production server on some guy's desk

Take a first generation iPhone. Now imagine if you could upgrade it to today’s A8 SoC. It’d be better than it was before, that’s for sure. But it’d still have a low-resolution non-retina display. It’d still be stuck with EDGE cellular networking. It’d still have a crappy camera that couldn’t even shoot video. Etc. The “computer” inside Apple Watch isn’t centrally important. Everything is important. The health sensors, the display, the battery, the Taptic Engine, the digital crown, the networking capabilities, everything.

This is bizarre. He doesn’t realize that a system-on-a-chip is a system-on-a-chip (e.g. “sensors” and “networking capabilities”).